If you read Forbes contributor Peter J. Reilly’s recent post entitled Advice For The Looming Tax Deadline – No Fooling, you easily could have missed the jab at the end toward all you whiny losers complaining about how hard tax season is.
I could waste a lot of characters here describing it, but you know what? Sometimes it’s better to just get to the point.
It is hard to think of a reasonably lucrative endeavour that is easier than being a CPA. The number one source of stress is not workload compression. It is envy. Unless you are in some odd specialty, you know that you will never be as wealthy as your wealthier clients. And then you sometimes see other professionals getting big checks, like the CLUs. And when you think about it how much better are their lives than yours?
Oh shit, shots fired. Y’all are miserable not because you’re worked like dogs but because you’re jealous that you have to work at all. I mean obviously all your clients were just handed large bags of money and didn’t, I dunno, earn that money or anything. Nah. You haters.
You might not have that kind of envy yourself, but half of the stress of tax season can be coming from decision makers who do. They continue to retain abusive clients and dream of people in other countries who will do the work that you do for a pittance and focus more energy on seemingly more lucrative work than the business at hand.
So not only are you jealous, but you have to put up with clients who would replace you with a guy in India who calls himself “Patrick” and charges half a cow and a dime to do their entire, complicated return. He ain’t wrong about that; no doubt clients would much rather you not exist at all than be required to use your services because you know shit they don’t.
At the end of the day, I think that most CPAs actually like tax season. It adds drama to what is in reality a really soft job. You work indoors, with access to plumbing facilities and face no risks to your health and safety that are not the common lot of mankind. You are largely insulated from the seamier side of life. And somehow for part of the year, a lot of people think you have it hard. Let them maintain their delusion, but stop kidding yourself. You’ll be happier. Believe me. I know.
On the one hand, I get what he’s saying, but on the other, this isn’t 1885. A lot of people in the first world enjoy cushy-ass jobs, but it doesn’t mean we can’t complain about them. So you aren’t ditch diggers or septic system drainers, that doesn’t mean you lost all right to bitch about work the moment you pursued a white-collar profession. And what the fuck do toilets have to do with this? Yeah, so some random Senegalese dude in a remote village halfway across the world has to shit in a ditch during his sheepherding shift, but what in the hell does that have to do with CPAs complaining about busy season?
Let’s keep in mind that Peter J. Reilly is one of y’all, so really this feels like a whole lot of projecting where a bit of disclosed self-reflection might have gotten the same point across. Do y’all whine about busy season a little more than you should? Maybe. So what, who is it hurting? Well, he’s right that maybe all that complaining is in fact making you just as miserable as the thing you’re complaining about, but so what? Jesus, let people have something to unite them.
If you take away busy season, there’s always something else to complain about. It’s what people do. I guarantee you Abdoulaye over in Senegal sometimes feels like a whiny little bitch for complaining about how hard he’s got it knowing somewhere in the world there’s someone who doesn’t even have a ditch to crap in. No need to beat yourself up over it.
